It’s been a busy few months here in PhD land, but don’t worry. I’ve not forgotten this website or blog. In fact, in the next couple of weeks you can expect a couple of bogs to come up focusing on different topics that may be of interest: this time Echoes of the City.
I want to talk a bit about the project that I am managing here in Edinburgh. It’s called Echoes of the City: Edinburgh’s Hidden Stories and it’s supported by The Bridge Awards and Edinburgh City of Literature. This project will take 15 stories and poems that are based around or set in Edinburgh locations and will geo-locate them using the innovate app Podwalk.
What does this mean? It means that a user can get the app for free and they play when the user physically enters the location where the stories are geo-tagged. The stories can be downloaded in advance or use the data to play on location. Imagine walking around the back of the Castle in Edinburgh, and the app picks up your location and begins telling you a sordid tale of love and jealousy that ended in tragedy, right where you are standing…
By geo-locating the stories in unique places throughout the city centre, Echoes of the City will engage listeners by taking them on a journey of stories and poetry, exploring sides of the city they might not have found through conventional means. The use of the Podwalk app will be supplemented by a website which will feature information about the project, biographies of the authors, written copies of the stories and a map of where users can find and listen to them.
Stories can be up to 1300 words and poems can be up to 5 pages. This leads to about 10 minutes in listening, which is about the average time people listen to podcasts.
Once all the stories are in, they get sent to a panel and then the best 15 will be chosen to be recorded by voice actors and professionally edited before being sent to the app developer and being placed in the app.
One thing I should mention about this project is how great it’s been to develop collaborations with different people, organisations, and experts in their fields. Blythe, of Lunchquest awesomeness (among other things) works his magic on the social media and generally being fantastic; while Chris Red has designed the logo that is specific to the project itself. Not to mention The Bridge Awards and City of Lit.
Oh, and if you're reading and interested in geo-locating literature, get in touch. This model is scalable.